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FAITHFUL LIVING FAITHFUL DYING
ANGLICAN REFLECTIONS
By Cynthia B. Cohen, Jan C. Heller, Bruce Jennings, E. F. Michael Morgan, David A. Scott, Timothy F. Sedgwick, David H. Smith Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2000 General Convention of the Episcopal Church
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2524-5
CHAPTER 1
THE REALITY OF DEATH
Death, for Christians, is understood not merely as an event that we must undergo at the end of life but also as an ever-present accompaniment to the story of our lives. It is an integral part of life, a mystery to be contemplated as we live. Here we consider the awesome force of death, exploring the import of the realization that we will die for all of us, but especially for those within the Anglican tradition. We then turn to consider the significance of death as a specific event in our lives. For Christians, the actual experience of death is real, but not ultimate; it does not speak the last word about our human condition. This exploration of the significance of death is not merely a philosophical bypath or theological nicety but is forced upon us by the often difficult decisions—medical, ethical, personal, and spiritual—that we must make when death appears on the horizon. Therefore, the task force reflects here upon how the Anglican perspective on the meaning of death can illuminate the concerns and realities that we face today near the end of life.
DEATH AS A PART OF LIFE
Throughout our lives, especially as we grow older, we are aware that someday we will die. This awareness is not often conscious but lies just beneath the surface, ready to emerge again and again. Many things can call it to mind. The death of someone whom we know well and love reminds us that we, too, must die. The death of a person our own age makes us pause, abruptly bringing our own mortality into focus. News headlines of a massacre, a plane crash, an epidemic, or an accident bring our awareness of the inevitability of our own death rushing to the fore. Even the change of the seasons reminds us that our lives, like all life around us, are caught up in a cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death. Aging makes the reality of upcoming death even more vivid to us as time becomes etched in the lines on our skin. We feel our mortality in our bones and in our discernibly diminishing capacities.
Thus, the awareness that someday we will die accompanies us throughout our lives, waiting to step out of the shadows of our absorption in the activities of daily life. And, in the Christian understanding of death, this is not a bad thing. We are taught by these recurring reminders of death to "number our days," that is, to contemplate that our lives have a limit. We have but one life to live and one life to offer. We can resist this awareness or we can consent to it. For Christians, the awareness of death can be a spiritual discipline, a part of the schooling that teaches us to mature in our faith. Indeed, within the Anglican tradition, a consciousness of the fact that we will die someday is a necessary accompaniment to faithful living.
Yet we receive little support from contemporary society for our Christian endeavor to face death in life. Our culture conspires against acknowledging its inevitability. Death in our secular society typically provokes fear and denial, rather than contemplation and reflection. And so our society deals with death by evasions and lies. Advertisements abound for products promising to hide or remove the signs of aging. Older persons who are approaching death are concealed behind the walls of institutions whose corridors we grace as little as common decency allows. The words "died" and "death" do not pass our lips; we speak instead of someone "passing away" or of "losing" those we love. We flee from acknowledging the reality of death.
Even as our culture conceals death in a heavy cloak of silence, it is obsessed with death. This is because it recognizes it as a power that is out of our control, one for which we have no effective response. To keep death at bay, we treat it as if it is only a fantasy played out in wars in distant lands or a fictional focus of entertainment for us in "gun em down" movies, killer video games, and horror houses at Halloween. Death is, for us, an unmentionable subject and yet a source of endless fascination. Our denial of its reality in modern Western culture is, paradoxically, heightened by our refusal to let go of it. Thus, death retains its terrible importance and meaning for us even as we pretend to ignore it.
Commentators have described our culture as "death-denying." Death and dying, this culture teaches, are unspoken terrors that will make their appearance at some far-off time. Therefore, we need not think about them today. It has become more difficult to acknowledge explicitly the reality of death in our society because we press it into a medical model, reducing it to a merely biological problem. Our culture has "assigned" such biological problems to medical experts whose training has taught them to see decline and death as signs of malfunctioning, and finally nonfunctioning, organ systems. Thus, death becomes an untoward biological accident that medicine, with its technological prowess, must attempt to avert. In such ways, our society brackets our awareness of death as an essential part of the story of our lives and makes it increasingly difficult for us to have a "death of our own."
True, there has been a relatively recent movement in Western societies urging an increased awareness of death. A drive toward consumer awareness is one piece of this movement. This drive is designed to help us protect ourselves from exploitation at a particularly vulnerable moment in our lives—the time when we purchase professional services related to dying and death. Such consumer protection requires us to acknowledge at some level, no matter how far removed, that we will die. Another piece of this contemporary death awareness movement is found in alternative, or holistic, medicine, a growing field that appears in part to be a reaction to the dominant medical model of illness, dying, and death. The holistic approach, which views the person as a whole being of mind, body, and spirit, counters our cultural tendency to perceive those who are sick merely as malfunctioning organisms. In so doing, it opens the door to the recognition that, as whole human beings, we are mortal.
The patients' rights movement of recent years provides yet another facet of this thrust toward death awareness, as it calls for respect for patient autonomy and choice in healthcare decisions, especially for those near the end of life. To have the responsibility of making difficult choices about our own treatment is to be forced to face the reality that some therapeutic options will be ineffective and end in death. Still another factor creating greater consciousness of death today is the growth of novel psychological programs that paint dying and death as opportunities for creative self-expression. They direct their clients' energy toward such projects as planning their own pre-death funerals, celebrated while they are still alive, or creating unique forms of ceremonial body disposal on land, sea, and air. Clearly, in order to make arrangements to "die with style," we must face the fact that we are dying.
Although this death awareness movement opens us to the reality of death and dying in some of its manifestations, it fails to capture the dread and loss that death conveys for most people in our society. The medicalization of death overlooks that death is not a mere biological accident. It is an event that overtakes us while we are living, creating in us mixed reactions of fear, love, dread, hope, and flight, long before the event itself arrives. The contemporary drives for consumer awareness and patients' rights, with their focus on protecting and empowering patients in the here and now, seem to disregard this awesome and often terrifying power of our awareness of death. Moreover, a danger of contemporary programs that seek out creative ways of dealing with dying is that they add yet another burden for us to bear. For if our lives are not right in the first place, dying "in character" and "with style" will not be a nurturing act that heightens our awareness of death but a fruitless effort to conform to a frivolous standard that conceals the full reality of death.
In the passive acquiescence of our society to the concealment of death, not only death is being denied. Life also is being denied. We deny that death is an indissoluble part of our lives. We deny the meaning of human life and of human dignity, framed as they are by the reality that, as mortal beings, we can choose to live bravely and faithfully in the face of death. Finally, we deny that we are bound to one another in community by our common mortality and vulnerability. As a result, there is a profound disequilibrium in the way that our society approaches death that, in turn, creates a deep imbalance in the way that it approaches life.
As Christians, we find that an awareness of the certainty of death is uniquely important throughout our lives, an integral part of faithful living. The Bible speaks of death utterly factually, forcing us to recognize our mortality. The reality of death is an unavoidable focus of Christianity, whose Savior, standing at the center of Christian faith and trust, suffered death. The Christian conviction of resurrection underscores the call to accept the inevitability of death, even while affirming that it is not the final word about human life. The Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Communion offers a rich liturgical tradition that sets death within the framework of God's creating, reconciling, and redeeming work. On Ash Wednesday, we engage in preparation for death when ashes are imposed on our foreheads with the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (BCP, 265). Our prayers for the ministration to the sick recognize that death is one of the possible outcomes of illness (BCP, 458, 461). In the burial service, we are reminded that "In the midst of life we are in death" (BCP, 484). The reality of death has always been embedded in the consciousness of Christians in such ways.
In earlier centuries, paintings of saints revealed that some kept a human skull among their daily possessions and even placed it before them when they meditated. Macabre as that may seem to our modern sensibilities, such a practice emphasized the truth of their mortality, a truth that no amount of frenetic busyness could eradicate from their awareness. Such an intentional reminder of the reality of death in the midst of life helped these Christians to understand that faithful dying is as much a part of the Christian pilgrimage as faithful living.
Jeremy Taylor, an Anglican divine of the seventeenth century, wrote what has subsequently been recognized as a classic on preparation for death, The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying. It begins with "Reflections on the Vanity and Shortness of Man's Life," in which Taylor compares the world to a storm in which our human lives rise up in each generation like bubbles. Although some lives last longer than others, they all disappear, giving place to others. In this context, Taylor recalls the New Testament Letter of James, which asks, "What is your life? For you are like a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" (James 4:14). Thus, he encourages each Christian to acknowledge the sober reality of death. This can serve as a bracing and even creative awareness. Knowing that we must die can make us grateful for the days of life we have now. Indeed, a major contemporary American novelist, Tom Wolfe, recounted in an interview that he had suffered a nearly fatal heart attack. After bypass surgery, he figured that if he could live to be eighty-five, he would have a specific number of days to live between his present age and his death. That calculation, he said, made him intensely thankful for and aware of the fullness of each day he now could live.
But death is not only a limit that can teach us to live each day more fully. It is also a mystery that brings a darker side of human existence to the fore. The New Testament, Christian theology, and Christian spirituality have always seen a mysterious link between human sinfulness and death. St. Paul speaks, for example, of sin as "the sting of death" (1 Corinthians 15:56). Paul's meaning may be that sin is separation from God, and that the reality of death, therefore, threatens to make that separation from the source and goal of our lives total and eternal. The sting of death, then, is the dread of eternal separation from God.
If Paul is right, it is natural that severe illness and the thought of death, whether imminent or in the future, should lead people to think seriously about their important relations, especially their relation with God. The Christian tradition has always seen life-threatening illness and the approach of death as an appropriate time for addressing our faithfulness to God. Thus, the Great Litany contains the petition that we not meet death unexpectedly and unprepared (BCP, 149). Jeremy Taylor gives considerable attention to the relation between illness, death, and repentance in Holy Dying. When we are ill, especially when seriously ill, he says, we are forced to recognize that we are mortal. This in turn spurs us to respond to the immortal and infinite God whom we will meet in judgment and in grace. As we do so in the Anglican tradition, we are aware of our separation from God and our need for repentance. Because of this, many of the prayers in the Office, "Ministration to the Sick," refer to sin and repentance. We find in the anointing of the sick with oil, for example, that the accompanying prayer reads, "May [God] forgive you your sins, release you from suffering, and restore you to wholeness and strength" (BCP, 456).
An awareness of death not only prompts us to examine our own sinfulness but also forces us to confront the truth that there are tragic deaths and suffering in the world. Theologians term this the "problem of evil." Some deaths are more untimely than others; some seem inexplicable and call into question the justice and love of God. When a child or a person in the prime of life dies, we find ourselves asking: how could a good God grant life to a young person, only to let it end in illness or accident? Tragic death, abruptly bringing a life to its end, brackets and highlights the whole of that life and opens the question of its meaning. Indeed, our realization that everything that has breath will die leads us to ponder the purpose of existence for any living being. Although we resist the idea that death is a punishment for individual sin, we must honestly recognize that the world in which we live, while essentially good, is also a world of death and suffering.
Such darker facets of human life and death lead us to question life's purpose. Ultimately, they may bring many of us to a strengthened faith in a God who is present with us now and forever. Christian faith, in affirming that our existence is meaningful, exposes the powerlessness of death before God's self-expending love. The Book of Common Prayer declares: "The liturgy for the dead is an Easter liturgy. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised" (BCP, 507). Moreover, we also recognize that death, even when premature and unwelcome, can bring relief from suffering for a person. And so, as sad as the death of someone we love who is infirm and experiencing suffering can be, it can also be an occasion to thank God for taking that person into God's loving arms, rendering that person "alive ... with Christ" (Ephesians 2:5). Even as such a death creates in us sorrow, relief, and thankfulness, it heightens our understanding that death opens the door to new life with God in community with others. Thus, an awareness of life's fleeting nature and of the sometimes tragic intrusions of death can often be the starting point of a life of faithful living, a life filled with meaning and purpose that ends in faithful dying.
DEATH AS A SPECIFIC EVENT IN OUR LIVES
Death not only brackets and informs our whole life, but becomes a present and inescapable reality at some crucial point for all of us. It moves into the center of our lives when we learn that we are terminally ill or chronically ill with a condition that will advance inexorably to the event of death. Knowing that we will die impels us to accept that our remaining days are numbered. These days can be, as Jeremy Taylor reminds us in Holy Dying, ones of dread or else of eager expectation—or perhaps both intermingled. And, as he and modern writers have observed, they can be days in which we suppress and avoid the truth of the approach of the event of death or ones in which we accept and embrace that truth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from FAITHFUL LIVING FAITHFUL DYING by Cynthia B. Cohen, Jan C. Heller, Bruce Jennings, E. F. Michael Morgan, David A. Scott, Timothy F. Sedgwick, David H. Smith. Copyright © 2000 General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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